Privatization holds the key to space travel

I respond to the Monday Forum column "Clipping NASA's wings was a mistake" by Charles Krauthammer.

I respond to the Monday Forum column “Clipping NASA's wings was a mistake” by Charles Krauthammer.

Fifty years after the first airline flight, there was a thriving commercial airline business. Fifty years after John Glenn orbited the Earth, space flight (even routine travel within earth’s orbit) is a horrifically expensive enterprise pursued only by governments. Why is that? Is it because space flight is just too hard? I don't think so.

The way the U.S. government-funded space program operates is by contracting with large aerospace firms with facilities across the country to design and build the components. NASA serves as the general contractor, doing little of the design work itself. The large aerospace firms employ thousands of lobbyists to keep the work spread across their many facilities and to make the technology as complex as possible so it is as costly as possible.

The NASA bureaucrats involved in procurement of equipment for manned space flight are more interested in serving their congressional overseers who control their funding than furthering the technology and improving access to space.

If you divide the cost of operating the space shuttle over the number of launches, each launch cost more than $1 billion. To get to the first Constellation launch, which was just a single-stage prototype with a dummy second stage and payload, it cost more than $1 billion. Consider then that the private firm SpaceX has barely spent that much designing and building a complete launch system with a pressurized spacecraft. It has done this with a mix of ex-NASA, Big Aerospace and Silicon Valley folks.

So, to counter the argument that the technical know-how is being lost, I maintain that the existing system of funding and development was the problem, and that private firms such as SpaceX are the key to exciting a new generation of rocket men and women and dramatically reducing the cost of access to low Earth orbit.

With the notable exception of the folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA's wings were clipped long ago.